Slayground p-13 Page 3

  This ride was an endless series of desert-island gags. On both sides the little boxes would light up, their mechanism triggered by something in the bottom of the raft as it went by, and in the boxes were representations of desert islands. Some of them contained one male doll alone, some contained two males, but most had one male and one female. Recorded voices gave out the tired old gag-lines, and the lit-up mannequins would make small mechanical movements, lifting their arms or slapping one another’s face. In the meantime, fluorescent mock-ups of various kinds of ships swooped down from the ceiling one after the other, as though to collide with the raft, but always swung hack up out of sight at the last moment.

  Parker watched, but for a long time there didn’t seem to be any place in here to stash the money. Then, just before the end of the ride, there was a bigger tableau than any that had come before it. This one, almost life-size, showed a large desert island with a hill in the middle. What one first saw on coming around I lie corner was a mannequin in tattered rags bobbing his head in delight over a chest of gold he’d just accidentally dug up. After l lie raft went by him, though, one could see that on the other side of the island, hidden from the castaway by the hill, was a longboat full of pirates that had just landed.

  Parker studied that last island, and then directly ahead was a pair of low wide doors closed above the water, with a huge mi cams hip painted on them in fluorescent colors as though a collision were imminent.

  This time the collision took place, the doors being locked for the winter. There was a slight bump, a brief grinding noise as the hooks disengaged from the track, the water began to make small gurgling sounds as it swirled by the stopped raft, and Parker got to his feet and climbed out onto the narrow walk In-side the channel. He carried the satchel back to that last display and stuffed it down inside the pirates’ longboat. Several of the figures were movable, and Parker shifted one until he was hull-squatting over the satchel. Then he walked back to the raft, used it to get over to the other side of the channel, and walked down a narrow corridor to the control room he’d started from.

  He opened the master switch and silence and darkness immediately fell. He cautiously pulled the outside door open, saw no one and went out.

  He still had a lot more to do.

  Five

  TEN MINUTES to five. Parker opened a door and stepped into darkness. When he switched on the flashlight it reflected back a dozen times, it showed him himself over and over, from every angle, as though he’d just sown dragon’s teeth and grown himself an army. It was the hall of mirrors, on the second floor of the fun house.

  In his other hand Parker carried a spray can of white paint he’d found in the storage closet downstairs. He began to move through the mirrors, spraying a round white circle about the size of a pancake about chest-high on every mirror.

  It took almost ten minutes to work his way through to the other end, and then he went through the black door and up the metal ladder to the roof, where he looked over the fake-grass roof of the Desert Island snack bar to the main gates. They hadn’t come in yet. He went back down to familiarize himself with the rest of the fun house.

  Quarter after five. Parker rode a rocket with wooden seats past suns and satellites to the end of the black-light Voyage Through the Galaxy. He got out of the rocket at the end of the trip, went into the control room, and turned off the electricity. Then he followed his flashlight beam back along the black-painted floor under the stars and moons.

  They were all hung by wire from the ceiling, the wire thin enough to be invisible but strong enough to hold some fairly heavy models. Parker found metal rungs in one wall, went up them to a catwalk, and from the catwalk reeled in a Saturn, a communications satellite and some rockets and stars. He removed them from their wires and left them lying together on the catwalk, then undid the wires from the ceiling. He carried the wires back down to floor-level and tied them in new places.

  When he was done, he went outside again. At the corner, he could look down past the Island Earth amusement rides section — a whip, a caterpillar, whirling pots — at the gates. Not yet.

  The other way was Pleasure Island. Parker walked through Pleasure Island, past the carousel with its mournful ponies and on into Hawaii.

  Five-thirty. The underwater ride was a vessel that rode almost completely submerged in water. Two streams ran across Fun Island from the moat that surrounded the place, and several rides and attractions were built on, or otherwise made use of, the water. Where the water was indoors, as in the Desert Island black-light ride, it had not yet frozen, but outdoors, as here, a thin crust of ice had formed.

  There were four of the underwater vehicles, three of them enclosed in a small service area behind the main ride, and the fourth out by the entrance and the ticket booth. Parker opened the hatch of one and went down inside, where a long row of seats faced portholes in the side wall. He had to stoop to walk down to the far end, where a separate seat faced all the rest. This is where in summer the boy would sit who delivered the spiel during the ride.

  What Parker was looking for was an underwater exit, even a small hatch, but there didn’t seem to be one, so he went back outside to look around. He walked back and forth, and in the service area he found a loose length of pipe with an elbow at one end. It was lying on the ground near one of the vehicles. He picked it up, carried it back to the first vehicle, and lowered it into the water. It would reach the portholes. Good. He put the pipe in the ticket booth and walked on down past the Polynesian restaurant to look down the main central blacktop path toward the gates.

  Still not.

  Twenty minutes to six. Parker took the ax from the executioner’s hand and squeezed the blade. It cracked in two, it was wax, like the masked executioner, like the kneeling victim, like the two priests looking on with hands clutched together at their breasts and fiendish smiles of joy on their faces.

  The wax museum was useless. Parker left it and walked through the thin powder of snow to the Alcatraz Island shooting gallery. His tracks were spreading out all over the park now, they wouldn’t lead anybody directly either to him or to the money.

  The shooting gallery was boarded up. When he broke in through the door at the side, Parker found that the rifles were not along the counter, the chains hung there empty. He looked around, and they were stowed in a wooden crate at the back of the gallery. They were air rifles, firing pellets of pressed cardboard. Parker fired one, and the pellet had no force at all. It would sting, no more. He threw the rifle back into the crate and went outside again.

  What else did Alcatraz have to offer him? The wax museum had been no good, the shooting gallery was no good. There was left the roller coaster, an outdoor gunboat ride and a restaurant. Parker went to check them out.

  Five minutes to six. Parker climbed to the bridge of the pirate ship. Far down at the other end of the park were the gates, livening was beginning to come on, the temperature was dropping, but the bunch outside still hadn’t made their move.

  Were they really waiting for darkness? Didn’t they realize that would only cut their advantage over him? The more time they gave him and the more darkness they gave him, the better off he’d be, didn’t they know that?

  Or maybe they were still waiting for their two cop friends to come back. It could be they’d decided not to come in after him without those two, and the cops hadn’t gotten off duty yet. With the manhunt still out for Parker, it might be quite a while before they came off duty.

  In the meantime, Parker only had the one gun, and that one not the best for this kind of situation. A Smith & Western Terrier, it was a five-shot .32 revolver with a two-inch barrel. Not enough bullets, not enough punch to the shot, and not enough barrel for long-range accuracy. With luck, he could get five of them at close range, but there were going to be more than five coming in after him. Somewhere in Fun Island he had to find other weapons, other ways to defend himself and disable them.

  He left the bridge, went down the stairs and across the deck and down
the gangplank off the pirate ship. He walked up to the long low building with the huge name out front: BUCCANEER! Again he had to break through a side door to get inside.

  This was another black-light ride, like Marooned! and Voyage Through the Galaxy. The customers rode in small pirate ships this time, through a channel of water like the one in Marooned! and past many similar displays and effects.

  This time Parker stopped his vessel halfway through, and stepped out into a miniature representation of New Orleans under pirate attack. Various colored lights flickered and gleamed on the mechanical movements of the dolls. Parker used one of the ornamental lines from his small boat to tie it to a building in the display, and then began to follow the wiring from the lights.

  They came together in a small box with an On-Off switch. Parker turned it off, and the display abruptly went dark. The rest of the displays along the route were still working, only this one had stopped.

  He had to work by flashlight, removing the wiring from several of the lights and fastening it carefully elsewhere. When he was done, he didn’t turn the display back on. He untied his boat, got back into it, and rode it the rest of the way through the ride. Since in stopping the boat he’d stripped it of its connection to the track, he was borne along by the water flowing through its winding metal trough inside the building, down to the end of the ride.

  Ten minutes after six. Parker took the hunting knife from a fake-leather sheath that read Souvenir of Fun Island and balanced it along one finger. The center of gravity was where it should be, where blade met handle. He held it at the point between thumb and finger and flicked it with a snap of the wrist the room. The point thudded into the gift-shop wall, the quivered there.

  It was pretty good, better than he’d expected. There was a small cardboard carton containing a dozen of the knives under a counter in the gift shop, the only useful items there. He put the carton under one arm, retrieved the first knife from the wall; and went outside to one of the narrow streets of New York Island, a sentimentalized version of New York City in the gay nineties. He’d been through the other shops, glanced into the camera store and restaurant and nickelodeon, but none of them seemed to contain anything he could use.

  It was getting darker. And colder. The gloves he’d found in the watchman’s office were coming in handy, though later on he wouldn’t be able to wear one on his right hand.

  At the end of the last street in New York Island he paused to look down toward the gate, but it was all silent and unmoving down there. He walked on to begin sowing his knives.

  Twenty minutes to seven. Parker walked into the theater in Voodoo Island. It was a small place, with hard wooden seats, but the stage was surprisingly well furnished. It even had a fly loft, a space above the stage where backdrops and flats could be lifted when they weren’t needed onstage. The ropes ran up from the pipes on which the backdrops were hung, went over pulleys just under the roof, and came down to one side of the stage, where a complicated series of counterweights kept the backdrops well enough balanced to be raised or lowered by one man.

  Parker went up the metal ladder to the catwalk, where the ropes and counterweights were. Nine backdrops and canvas flats were suspended above the stage now, each of them weighing two or three hundred pounds. Parker tied the ropes with slipknots to the railing waist-high beside the catwalk, then removed the metal weights from their wooden racks tied to the ropes. Each weight was about twenty pounds, a piece of iron shaped somewhat like a gold ingot. He lined them all along the edge of the catwalk, then climbed back down the ladder to the stage and went over to the main control board. He tried all the switches, and discovered two trap doors in the stage floor. He’d expected there might be one or two, having seen magic acts advertised out front.

  The theater had nothing else to offer him, so he went back outside. It was almost fully night now, the buildings all merely black hulks against the pale snow. He was turning on the lights in each building when going in, and turning them off again on the way out, leaving the entire park in darkness. They’d see the intervals of light outside, if they were looking through the entrance, but it wouldn’t tell them anything.

  To his left was the snake house. He’d already been in there, and it was empty, the cages standing open. The cages might prove handy eventually, but so far he didn’t see how.

  Ahead was the band shell, even more useless than the snake house. Back behind the theater was the entrance to the outdoor jungle ride. There might be useful things there, but it was too dark now to look for them. That left the only other thing in the Voodoo Island section, another black-light ride, this one called Land of Voodoo. Parker walked across the crunching snow and kicked in the door to the Land of Voodoo.

  Seven o’clock. Parker stepped into the watchman’s office and turned on the radio. He was just in time to hear the news announcer describe the seven-state manhunt being undertaken in the search for the lone bandit who escaped from today’s daring daylight robbery of a Merchant Bank’s armored car on Abelard Road near the ball park. All city police were working extra shifts, roadblocks were being set up all over the damn place, there was even a special phone number citizens could call if they wanted to confuse the issue. The two captured robbers, neither as yet identified, were unconscious still in Schumann Memorial Hospital, where they were both under tight police guard. “If their buddy tries to get them away from us again,” the chief of police was quoted as saying, “we’ll be ready for him.”

  Parker shook his head and switched off the radio. The rest of the world had some strange Robin Hood ideas sometimes. He wouldn’t risk his neck to drag Grofield and Laufman out of the hospital now even if he could, and neither of them would expect him to. They were on their own now, to work things out the best way they could.

  And so was Parker. He wouldn’t expect Grofield or Laufman or anybody else to come in here now and give him a hand. He’d walked into this himself, it was up to him to walk back out again himself. He understood that, and he didn’t worry about it. There was a telephone on the desk, but he hadn’t even bothered to check and see if it was working. There was no one to call.

  It didn’t occur to him to call Claire. There was no point telling her he was in the middle of a mess, because there was nothing she’d be able to do about it. He would either get back to her or he wouldn’t. In the meantime, he had no space in his mind for anything but what was taking place right here.

  He sat at the desk and studied the park map again. Had he covered everything, seen everything, considered every possibility?

  The Land of Voodoo and Marooned! black-light rides both used boats traveling through channels of water, so he’d made electrical preparations with them just like the one in the Buccaneer! ride. He’d seeded the knives around in all eight sections of the park, retaining only two, their sheaths now attached to his belt and tucked partway down into his hip pockets. He’d checked out all the buildings and several of the outdoor attractions. There was nothing left to do now but wait.

  He’d turned on the gooseneck lamp on the desk, but now he folded the map again and switched it off. There was an electric heater on the floor, he’d turned that on before, and in addition to heat it gave off an orange-red glow, enough light to move around by.

  He carried the chair from the desk over to the window. Sitting there, he could just see the gates. He rested one elbow on the window sill and waited.

  Eight o’clock. Parker was used to the dull red light from the electric heater, it was plenty to see by. He crossed the little office and turned on the radio and waited for the announcer to tell him why nobody had come through those goddam gates yet. But the announcer had no information on that subject. The only news he had about the robbery was that one of the robbers in Schumann Memorial Hospital, the one thought to have been the driver of the getaway car, was not expected to live. The other one was expected to live.

  Parker turned off the radio again and went back through the red darkness and sat down in the chair and looked out through the wh
ite darkness to the yellow and gray darkness at the main gate. So Laufman was going to die. And Grofield was going to live. Well, Grofield had never been inside the pen, it would be a new experience for him.

  Parker had only been inside once, and that was nine years ago, and it had been a simple prison farm in California on a simple vag charge, but it had wound up with his fingerprints on file for the first time in his life, and because of some other things that had happened, those fingerprints were now connected with a couple of murder charges, so even if it was legitimate law he was waiting for here and not hoods, it wouldn’t be very good.

  Thinking about Grofield had made him think of prison, and that had made him think of his own single experience that way, and now he went from that to the death of his wife, Lynn, which had been involved in that whole mix-up that time nine years ago, and from that he got to thinking about other people he knew that were dead now, and how few died of old age. Dent, any day now, was going to be an exception.

  There was a fellow named Salsa, very pretty but very tough. One time in Galveston when Parker had been staying briefly with a weird girl named Crystal, Salsa had said to him, “Your woman wishes to photograph me unclad.” He’d been asking Parker’s permission, and Parker had said, “What do I care?” That was shortly before Salsa was dead, in a job they were all doing together on an island. A real island, not a fun island.

  Now he stirred and sat up and stretched his arms up in the air and shook his head. “I’m getting like Dent,” he said out loud. Sitting here thinking about dead people, as though his own life was over now.

  It was having nothing to do. It was stupid that they didn’t come in. They should have come in a long time ago, in daylight. Now they not only had given him time to booby-trap the whole damn park against them, they’d given him darkness to hide in. They were just making it tough. Unless they weren’t coming in? Was that a possibility, any way at all? Parker leaned forward again, his elbows and forearms on the window sill, and brooded out at the silent empty gate, seen at an angle from here, and he thought about it. Possibility one: they were just going to wait out there until he came out again. Possibility two: for some reason, they’d changed their minds and gone away and there was no reason why he couldn’t just pick up the satchel and leave.